After five days' trial and extraordinary contest, the Lord Mohun was acquitted by the Lords of the murder of Montford, the player, notwithstanding the judges, from the pregnant witnesses of the fact, had declared him guilty; but whether in commiseration of his youth, being not eighteen years old, though exceedingly dissolute, or upon whatever other reason, the King himself present some part of the trial, and satisfied, as they report, that he was culpable. 69 acquitted him, only 14 condemned him.
Unheard of stories of the universal increase of witches in New England; men, women, and children, devoting themselves to the devil, so as to threaten the subversion of the government.79 At the same time there was a conspiracy among the negroes in Barbadoes to murder all their masters, discovered by overhearing a discourse of two of the slaves, and so preventing the execution of the design. Hitherto an exceedingly mild winter. France in the utmost misery and poverty for want of corn and subsistence, while the ambitious King is intent to pursue his conquests on the rest of his neighbors both by sea and land. Our Admiral, Russell, laid aside for not pursuing the advantage he had obtained over the French in the past summer; three others chosen in his place. Dr. Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury's book burned by the hangman for an expression of the King's title by conquest, on a[Pg 320] complaint of Joseph How, a member of Parliament, little better than a madman.